Bill Z Bubba

No, of course not, and as my edit shows, she can't survive it well at all much less stroll into the room with zero chance of defeat like the tank. Again, though, while Bio is awesome in many ways, the mitigation it provides is absolutely inferior to Shield's. But here's the real problem with these discussions. Teams make everything in this game meaningless in general. Balancing powersets and archetypes, especially the ATs that share powersets, based on how they perform with a team is an absolute non-starter for me. How they team is meaningless because when teamed, one aggro sponge and 7 corruptors will decimate everything, even the new higher diff mode TFs. How is that even remotely relevant to determining whether a tank's mitigation to damage output ratio is out of whack with its brute and scrapper cousins? (If anyone ever wonders why I so often ignore stalkers in these discussions, it's because of Hide. I place stalkers as far away from tank/brute/scrappers as I do sentinels.) That's why my area of focus remains the mitigation/damage output ratio. From everything I've seen from others to everything I've tested myself, one thing remains clear: while the damage output of tanks remains at the bottom, (in most cases,) and their mitigation remains at the top, their damage output is too close considering how far ahead they are on mitigation, especially now on the AoE side. I always viewed tanks exactly as @High_Beammentioned earlier: slow, plodding and immortal. Where scrappers were blenders that often took on more than they should and faceplanted for their trouble. That's just not the case anymore as the Trapdoor thread in the scrapper forum is showing. Tanks were fine as they were. If you soloed one, you could ramp up the difficulty far higher and earlier than brutes/scrappers could and that alone closed the leveling speed gap. Now they get the best of everything. Biggest AoEs, biggest targets caps, best mitigation, and single target damage close enough to brutes (when solo, of course,) just massive wrecking balls of doom with zero downside for their godliness.

True statement. My nrg/bio/soul scrapper sits around 75 to 90 seconds on a pylon but she has zero chance of surviving a no insp max diff ITF unless I spend hours single pulling every spawn. Even then, I rather doubt she'd make it through the 2nd mission. Edit: Make that, she didn't survive the first spawn even through barrier and shadow meld. But yes, I should hop on test and build up both scrap and brute nrg/shielders (as I already have with claws and SR) and run the same tests but based on builds I've looked at, and my history of testing with claws and sr, while pylon/AV times will follow the same order you stated, their inability to ignore incoming damage as tanks can will always slow them down considerably against everything else. I will also admit the silliness of it all considering I have to use max diff no insp TFs for testing...

My shield/nrg tank has a 1hr30min solo no insps max diff ITF time and a 2min48sec average pylon time. That's on par with my claws/sr scrapper for pylons and vastly faster on the ITF because the tank doesn't have to waste any time surviving. "Slow" doesn't seem an appropriate description.

Even NCSoft just wants to ignore us!

I have the exact same philosophy! Which is why I spend my cash on really GOOD beer.

You fail reading comprehension. Got it.

It has nothing to do with challenge. It has everything to do with balance. Thus my post in the other thread that offended you so. And as for the rest of that idiotic post, I just added some "challenge" to my gameplay by experiencing this while soloing a +4 MLTF. Love to know how he manages that through capped Smash resists and 65% Nrg resist. Regardless, the faceplant meant no win for me. @BillyMailmanHelped me figure it out. Aeon's unstoppable came back up, giving him a 160% damage buff, his clone had a 30% resistance debuff on me, and the rest is licking the floor.

I admit my nerfherding ways but I buffherd, too!

So what we're left with is AE is the best source of XP/hr. And to that I'm left asking, "So what?"

Wasn't what was being discussed but I'll certainly agree to that. I don't marketeer only because I find it boring AF and I only farm these days to PL new alts. I know it's heresy in some circles but I only carry around 5 billion total inf and have reached an equilibrium between what I spend on new builds and give away vs what I make by playing what little I play these days.

I'm attempting to get some specifics from a marketeering buddy of mine, but I seem to recall from prior discussions that his inf/hour gain completely trounced fire farming.

I suspect it's a side-effect of real life. Just dinged 50 at the end of June. Creeping up on 15 months off work. Interview for new gig scheduled for the 16th. Bah, I like bein a bum.

Because that was the cap on the old difficulty system. The one that existed when the concept of "the game is balanced on SOs" actually meant something rational unlike now where the game is in no way balanced around SOs. EDIT: Or if it is, then it actually is horrifically unbalanced as IOs exist. I do. Often. It's a mess.

That will never cease to crack me up by the way: "The Game Is Balanced Around SOs" automatically means "Since IOs exist, the game is now ridiculously and stupidly unbalanced."

I'm actually in agreement with the no emp to reward merit conversion but I'm forced to ask ya, will you continue not to care if ALL rewards are removed/nerfed into oblivion? Meaning, when you run the story arcs you enjoy, you get no xp, no inf, or drastically reduced amounts? Are you ambivalent on that front as well?

Squishy when comparing hovering vs non-hovering. And, no, you'd be wrong, when running at appropriate difficulty for SO only builds, meaning anything up to +2/x2 and no higher which is the max diff we could run solo back before IOs, no sent is squishy.

One of the camps wants to remove all rewards from you while you run those stories. The other camp doesn't. I suspect you're either in one of the camps or truly don't care.

It wouldn't. There's some general truths about earning xp/inf that aren't going to change and that were already proven ages ago.

That's fair. KB is numerically inferior to KD. Sure, it can be fun to watch when one is in the mood for it, but that's a different topic. Since I am a balance junkie, ok, there should be a cost to turn KB to KD because it makes the power a superior version of itself. Ridding my emp/nrg defender of KB surely made her vastly better than she was. Guess I'm now on the side of nope for the toggle idea.

We can all choose to play as we wish. I have a ground pounder rad/regen sentinel that fights in melee because of Rad's pbaoes. He's far squishier than my fire/bio sent that hovers as my fire/bio would be if I sat in melee. Being ABLE to hoverblast in complete safety as a tankmage is a perk of being a sentinel.

So you've been against every buff to anything ever added to the game? Because that's all any buff is: a sudden "free advantage" that didn't exist before the change.

Lower damage and shorter range should absolutely stay as is. Caps should be standardized and Opportunity should be completely reworked into something useful for both the player and a team that doesn't rely on utilizing the T1 or T2 attacks. That's my hope for future changes.

And that's why I agree that sents should have the same target caps as the other blast sets. They don't bring anything useful to a team environment other than damage so that portion of their job should not be *AS* hamstrung as it is by said caps.

No, I'm saying that because a sentinel can attack from above, never being hit by the vastly larger amount of incoming damage from melee, while having an armor secondary, it's functionally immortal in this game. Blasters can also hover but they can be mezzed and overcome by even the piddly ranged damage because they lack useful mitigation.